Jun. 03, 2011

Probing The Sun’s Spots

Reporting in the journal Science, Göran Scharmer, of the Institute for Solar Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and colleagues looked closely at a sunspot using the Swedish Solar Telescope. Sunspots are formed by magnetic fields interacting with boiling of hot plasma--but exactly how the plasma flows in the stringy penumbra region wasn’t well understood.